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Murder By Guitar: San Francisco punk band Crime live at San Quentin prison, 1978
11.12.2014
10:21 am
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A 2012 reproduction of Crime’s San Quentin flyer.
 
So if anyone has been looking for an index of how the world has changed since 1978, here’s one valuable piece of data. That Labor Day, the San Francisco punk band Crime played a show in San Quentin State Prison. The members of the band wore matching dark blue police uniforms, and as they played such originals as “Crime Wave,” “Piss on Your Dog” and “Rockabilly Drugstore,” inmates waved flyers that screamed “CRIME,” the band’s block-letter logo, above a drawing of a leather-clad dominatrix in a jail cell. I’m no expert, but I don’t think any festivities along these lines are planned for San Quentin this year. I bet they’re lucky if the warden lets them watch a rerun of The Voice.
 

 
How did this supremely unlikely event come to pass? Drummer Hank Rank told an interviewer from Amoeba Music a few years ago:

Contrary to popular perception, there were not many venues for early punk bands. Bill Graham publicly declared that he would never allow a punk band to play any of his venues, and many smaller clubs were scared by what they read about the goings-on at punk shows. That’s why we were open to the idea of Museums Without Walls that put art and music in unlikely places, so when we were contacted with the opportunity by Lynn Hershman (now Leeson), we jumped. We were the only punk band on the show that hot sunny day in the exercise yard at the Q, and neither the prisoners nor the guards knew what to make of us. The window of the cell where Sirhan Sirhan was in solitary was directly opposite where we played, and I’d like to think that our show was the worst punishment of his life.

 

 
Hank Rank and singer/guitarist Frankie Fix described the show in a contemporary interview with New York Rocker:

On Labor Day of this year, Crime entered San Quentin and performed for over 500 prisoners. “It was something we had wanted to do for a long time,” said Rank. “We knew we’d be playing for a crowd that was really into crime.”

As the prison gig approached, Crime almost got cold feet. “As it got closer,” said Rank, “things we were hearing got scarier. They said we couldn’t wear blue jeans or a work shirt ‘cause in the event of a riot, they wouldn’t want us to get shot, mistaken for prisoners. Then they told us about the no-hostage rule which is that if you’re taken hostage by a prisoner, they will not bargain for your life. If he says he’s going to kill you if they won’t let him out, they’ll say ‘Fine, kill this person. We don’t care. We’re not letting you out.’”

According to the band, the San Quentin gig was not their best. “It was in the daylight,” explained Fix, who rarely rises before 5 p.m.

“It was blazing heat,” said Rank, “and they had a little speaker for a PA. And imagine, you’re looking out there at a mass of 500 people and all I could see were crimes written on their faces: rape, murder, mutilation. All the disgusting side of humanity was sitting there looking at us.”

 

 
Gimme Something Better, an oral history of Bay Area punk, gives a few more details:

Hank Rank: There was sort of a demilitarized zone between the stage and the prisoners. There was a rope, and then the prisoners were all behind that. And they really divided right down the middle, blacks on one side and non-blacks on the other. When a black group would play, all of the non-blacks would stand up and move to the far side of the yard. When a non-black group would play, the exact opposite would happen. So when we hit the stage, they all got up and moved away [...] It was a tough crowd. They didn’t exactly get the music, and the guards up on the tower with their guns, looking down, shaking their heads. Nobody there knew what to make of us.

Joe Rees [of Target Video, who filmed the show]: Up on the walkway was a black female guard with a high-powered rifle. She had an afro, and it was bleached blond. You’d think that she was part of the show. Policemen performing the music. Inmates with their eyes hanging out. It was so bizarre.

Johnny Strike [singer/guitarist]: Frankie was so nervous, he was popping Valiums. By the time he hit the stage, I looked over at him and I was like, “Oh man. He’s totally out to lunch, he’s singing the wrong song.” Somehow we pulled it off.

Murder By Guitar 1976-1980, released last year, collects all of Crime’s original studio recordings. Superior Viaduct put the album out on vinyl and MP3 this summer.

According to at least one Crime discography, Target Video released the whole show on VHS, but YouTube only has this great clip of “Piss on Your Dog.”
 

Posted by Oliver Hall
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11.12.2014
10:21 am
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‘Hannibal Lecter’ cannibal eats woman alive
11.07.2014
07:41 am
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A “Hannibal Lecter” style cannibal was tasered to death by police after being found eating a woman alive in an hotel room in Wales.

Matthew Williams was discovered by security guards at the Sirhowy Arms Hotel in Argoed, Caerphilly, chewing on 22-year-old Cerys Marie Yemm’s eyeball “like a Creme Egg”. He was then seen eating half her face while in a “zombie-like” state.

Hotel staff called police who arrived and tasered Williams as he resisted arrest. It has been reported that Williams was high on cocaine and collapsed and died when hit by the electric shock.

The cannibal killer and his victim were both pronounced dead at the scene.

One shocked local, Lynn Beasley, told press:

“He went Hannibal Lecter on the woman. He gouged her eyeball out, ate that and then ate and half her face. He had just been released from prison and was high on coke.”

Another local woman, Jill Edwards, who lives near the hotel said:

“This animal was eating this girl to death. He murdered her so police stopped him – good on them. Security said they told him no girls in his room and he didn’t answer when they went to check. When they opened his door he was eating her face.”

It is believed Williams was in a relationship with Cerys Marie Yemm, who he had brought back to the hotel for a drink. Williams, who was nicknamed “Fifi,” was staying at the hotel following his release from prison after serving only half of a five-year prison sentence for an attack on his ex-partner. The hotel is used as a hostel for homeless, “vulnerable people” and recently released offenders.

Police said they were not looking for anyone else in connection with the “incident.”
 

 
Via Daily Record & Daily Star
 

Posted by Paul Gallagher
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11.07.2014
07:41 am
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‘Dog Day Afternoon’: The true story
10.25.2014
07:06 pm
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The suspenseful 1975 crime drama, Dog Day Afternoon, was nominated for six Oscars—including one for actor Al Pacino’s ultra-intense turn as “Sonny Wortzik,” based on the real-life ill-fated Brooklyn bank robber, John Wojtowicz. It is justly considered one of the classics of Seventies cinema, but what of the actual story behind the events portrayed in the film?

From what I can tell, Sidney Lumet’s film, from a screenplay by Frank Pierson (A Star is Born, Cool Hand Luke, Soldier’s Girl), and based on reporting from LIFE magazine, was essentially pretty accurate to real-life events. John Woitowicz, a bisexual man and former bank clerk, convinced two accomplices, 18-year-old Salvatore Naturile (who was killed by the FBI) and Robert Westenberg (who fled the crime scene when we saw the first police car show up) to help him rob a bank. The reason for the heist, which was poorly planned and partially based on something in The Godfather (which Woitowicz had only seen that morning) was to obtain the money to pay for a sex-change operation for Wojtowicz’s partner, a pre-op transsexual named Elizabeth “Liz” Eden (played in the film by Oscar-nominated actor, Chris Sarandon).
 
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Wojtowicz, writing The New York Times in an unpublished letter from his jail cell after the film was released, described his reasons for the bank robbery:

“[...] I did what a man has to do in order to save the life of someone I loved a great deal. His name was Ernest Aron (now known as Ms. Liz Debbie Eden) and he was Gay. He wanted to be a woman through the process of a sex-change operation and thus was labeled by doctors as a Gender Identity Problem. He felt he was a woman trapped in a man’s body. This caused him untold pain and problems which accounted for his many suicide attempts. I met him in 1971 at an Italian Bazaar in N.Y.C. after two years of separation from my female wife, Carmen, and two children.

Ernest and I were married in Greenwich Village in N.Y.C. on 12/4/71 in a Roman Catholic ceremony. We had our ups and downs as most couples do, and I tried my best to get him the money he needed for his sex change operation he so badly needed. I was unable to obtain the funds for his birthday on 8/19/72 and so, on Sunday, 8/29, he attempted suicide while I was at of the house. He died a clinical death in the hospital but was revived. While I went to get his clothes, he was declared mentally sick and sent to the Psychiatric Ward of Kings County Hospital in Brooklyn, NY. I went to see him and I tried to obtain his release on 8/21, but was told he would not be released and would stay there for a long time until he was cured.

Soon 8/22/75, along with two others, I began what I felt was necessary to save the life of someone I truly and deeply loved. No monetary value can be placed on a human life, and as it says in the Bible - “No greater love both a man then to lie down his life for another.”

 
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On August 22, 1972, Wojtowicz, Naturile and (at first) Westenberg attempted to rob a Chase Manhattan branch on the corner of East Third Street and Avenue P in Gravesend, Brooklyn. What was supposed to take ten minutes turned into a fourteen hour stand-off and hostage negotiations with police, and saw hundreds, if not thousands, of onlookers showing up to gawk at the events. For about two days Wojtowicz became an unlikely sort of media anti-hero.

John Wojtowicz was sentenced to twenty years in prison, but got out after fourteen. A photograph of Wojtowicz with Liz Eden (who was able to get a sex change operation out of the $7500 fee that Wojtowicz made from the film) after his release can be see here. Liz Eden died of AIDS-related pneumonia in 1987. John Wojtowicz was living on welfare in Brooklyn when he died of cancer in 2006.

The trailer for Dog Day Afternoon (note The Living Theatre’s Judith Malina as Wojtowicz’s mother):
 

 

After the jump, Harry Reasoner reports on the Brooklyn bank heist gone wrong on ABC News in 1972

Posted by Richard Metzger
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10.25.2014
07:06 pm
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The ordinary faces of evil: Mugshots of female Nazi concentration camp guards
10.22.2014
08:41 am
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Frieda Walter: sentenced to three years imprisonment.
 
Though their actions were monstrous, they are not monsters. There are no horns, no sharp teeth, no demonic eyes, no number of the Beast. They are just ordinary women. Mothers, sisters, grandmothers, aunts, widows, spinsters. Ordinary women, ordinary human beings.

In the photographs they look shameful, guilty, scared, brazen, stupid, cunning, disappointed, desperate, confused. These women were Nazi guards at the Belsen-Bergen concentration camp during the Second World War, and were all tried and found guilty of carrying out horrendous crimes against their fellow human beings—mothers, fathers, sisters, brothers, daughters, sons. Interesting how “evil” looks just like you and me.
 
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Hilde Liesewitz: sentenced to one year imprisonment.
 
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Gertrude Feist: sentenced to five years imprisonment.
 
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Elizabeth Volkenrath: Head Wardess at Belsen-Bergen: sentenced to death. She was hanged on 13 December 1945.
 
More Nazi mugshots, after the jump…
 

READ ON
Posted by Paul Gallagher
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10.22.2014
08:41 am
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T-shirt honors NYC mayor’s boneheaded ‘Stop-and-Frisk’ tabloid headline
10.21.2014
10:25 am
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On Friday, June 28, 2013, Michael Bloomberg, then serving out the last few months of twelve loooong years as mayor of New York City, made one of those comments on his weekly radio show that politicians sometimes make when circumstances have forced their hand on a policy position that is neither tenable nor reversible. For some years stop-and-frisk had outraged citizens over baldly racist N.Y. Police Dept. practices of detaining minority citizens, policies that yielded superficial improvements in crime statistics as well as a great deal of busywork for police officers. Rather than own up to the inherent disgrace in treating minorities as criminals, Bloomberg reached for one of those counterintuitive defenses politicians sometimes favor when they’re about to dismiss the rights of a great number of people.

Bloomberg said, “We disproportionately stop whites too much. And minorities too little.”

The next day, in the curious “headline-ese” of the N.Y. Daily News, that sentiment ran as follows: 
 

We stop
TOO
many
WHITES

 
Democratic candidate for mayor Bill de Blasio, then still in a primary hunt, blasted that statement, and some observers have credited that specific moment of distancing himself from the excesses of the Bloomberg administration with his later electoral victories. Four months later, Bill de Blasio, famously married to an African-American woman and the father of two biracial (and highly entertaining) children, was elected mayor of New York, a choice that was widely seen as a rebuke to Bloomberg’s handling of the NYPD. The era of stop-and-frisk was over—at least so went the hope. We all know that such policies have a way of being tenacious. (De Blasio has had considerable success in reducing the policy.)
 

 
Suffice to say that while the rest of the country might find all of this rather picayune, a certain subset of liberal New Yorkers remembers those months fondly. De Blasio became the first staunchly “liberal” mayor of the city since unfortunate David Dinkins, the only African-American mayor the city has ever had, who had the misfortune to preside at the absolute pinnacle of the crack epidemic and a major recession. His perceived failures ushered in Rudy Giuliani, who, suffice to say, looked a whole lot better at the time. In any case, Bloomberg’s comment, the headline, it all is a product of one of those charged moments that maybe only New Yorkers care about (even if they do become noticed by the nation at large): Bernie Goetz, Lizzie Grubman, Sully Sullenberger, Dr. Jonathan Zizmor, Robin Byrd….

Enter Ashok “Dapwell” Kondabolu, of the currently defunct and oddly timely NYC alt-hip hop outfit Das Racist. He’s designed a T-shirt with the Daily News cover. You can get a T-shirt for $20 and a sweatshirt for $40. As Dapwell says on the site, “Remember this guy? Remember when he said this shitty thing? ... Commemorate New York City’s gone but (sadly) not forgotten Mayor Mike with one of these high quality, screen-printed, and 100% ultra cotton sweatshirts and t-shirts featuring the ACTUAL June 29, 2013 cover of the Daily News.”

Rush as fast as you can to get one, because there ain’t many left—indeed, it may be too late. Dapwell says that there is “VERY LIMITED QUANTITY”—no kidding, just yesterday he said on Twitter that there’s just one sweatshirt left and “a dozen” shirts.
 

 
via Animal

Posted by Martin Schneider
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10.21.2014
10:25 am
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Dickhead cop asks ‘Why is it everybody who plays Frisbee golf smokes weed?’
10.13.2014
12:41 pm
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An Iowa police officer named Aaron King is under fire after this video made the rounds on the Internet. King is seen giving a motorist a written warning for their headlights not working properly and then asks, “Why is it everybody that plays Frisbee golf smokes weed?” in an attempt to get the motorist to agree to a search of his vehicle.

The interaction is annoying as all hell. My blood was boiling while watching it, but the joke’s on Officer King, as the motorist quickly realized what was actually happening and that his rights were being violated.

“In the video taken by an occupant in the vehicle, the officer engages the driver in a line of questioning that is foolish and not representative of the Ankeny Police Dept.’s training or interactions with the public. This verbal exchange did not meet the level of professionalism expected of Ankeny police officers,” Chief Gary J. Mikulec said in a statement posted to the city’s website.

More than anything, it’s an interesting—even educational—video to watch just to witness a dickhead cop’s manipulative “wordplay” in action.

 
via NBC News

Posted by Tara McGinley
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10.13.2014
12:41 pm
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Caught on camera: Creepy burglar breaks into home, sniffs panties then tries them on
10.10.2014
10:34 am
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A burglar has been caught on camera breaking and entering a Chicago home, sniffing a pair of women’s panties then trying them on.

Homeowner Steve Fremond says his girlfriend is “very scared” after the incident was captured on the couple’s surveillance camera. Fremond said he had heard rumors of bizarre burglaries in the neighborhood before his own home was broken into. Fremond posted the video on You Tube stating:

my fiance and i came home late last night and found our ladder propped under our window. after checking our ip cam we realized we had been burglarized.

UPDATE: apparently there have been a string of break ins in our neighborhood and this is the only video

In a news report Fremond added:

“It would’ve been difficult for me to prove it if I didn’t catch it on camera,” he said.

“The guy didn’t take any valuables that we know of.”

In the video, the unidentified burglar can be seen examining a photograph of Fremond’s girlfriend while sniffing a pair of panties before putting them on and sashaying around the room. Mr. Fremond said his initial reaction on seeing the footage was one of disbelief “but once it sank in I was a little scared.”

“My girlfriend was very scared though. If you look towards the end of the video you could see him take the picture of her off of the table.”

Creepy!

Mr. Fremond has passed the video on to the police but no arrests have as yet been made.
 

 
Via Arbroath
 

Posted by Paul Gallagher
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10.10.2014
10:34 am
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‘Joni Mitchell, my dad, the F.B.I. & the mysterious Tim Buckley imposter / jewel thief’
10.06.2014
02:54 pm
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This is a guest post written by Emil Amos of Holy Sons

In early 2006 my father was lying in a hospital bed in the Miami Veteran’s Administration hospital being treated for advanced stage cancer. On weekends I’d call to check in on him on breaks from my job at a homeless shelter in Portland, OR. He’d had an obsession with military history books ever since he’d been a ranger in Marines as a teenager, so I mentioned that I’d recently gotten fixated on books detailing the history of various secret services. That’s when he told me for the first time that he’d been interrogated by the FBI three times in his life and naturally I wanted to hear all the stories…

It was the third story he told that really blew my mind since I’d been deeply immersed in researching 70’s records and my father had hung out with many of the exact musicians I’d been borrowing from in my own music. I’d grown up hearing lots of insane tales about all the musicians that had migrated to Miami in the 60’s and crossed paths with my father. He’d often go sailing with John Oates, David Crosby or Stephen Stills, usually introducing me as “The Boss.” I can remember being with him at one of the Bee Gees mansions and standing in their driveway as my father bargained with one of the Gibb brothers, trying to buy me one of their gold cars.

My mother and I left for North Carolina when I was six so my memories of these times were always foggy and most of the classic stories were handed down to me on long car rides when my mom would tell me just how wild my dad’s adventures had really been. If you’d met him even once, virtually any legendary tale was believable as his charisma, energy and presence was larger than life and had gained him a virtual folk hero status in Coconut Grove.
 

 
For example, I was a little shocked to find out that I was conceived while my father was on LSD while in front of some of my professors, a monk I was studying under, my mother and my buddy Duncan Trussell’s family while we all sat at my college graduation dinner. That’s the kind of anecdote he’d pull out for a quick laugh at the dinner table! 

In the late 1950s my father sailed constantly and could use the stars to find his way and navigate alone, having sailed straight through the Bermuda Triangle and all the way to Morocco. These skills probably began back when he was an underwater demolitions expert in the Marines… something I only really knew about because he’d make grenades on the kitchen table out of gunpowder and drive me down to the docks to toss them into the water to watch their delayed explosions until the cops would come circling around.
 

 
Sailing became trendy among the folk music set in Miami probably because you could feel more free by getting off land, away from the eyes of straights and law enforcement while indulging in the drugs of your choice or trafficking them yourself by picking up dropped shipments. The great folksinger Vince Martin had set off a trend of moving to Coconut Grove by being the first to abandon New York in the early 60’s for Miami’s tropical beauty. Fred Neil, one of Bob Dylan’s early idols, followed him down and wrote classic songs like “The Dolphins” during the period when he’d go sailing with my dad. My father told me they’d actually met when Fred Neil collapsed in the corner of his boat to sleep off an underestimated high before he knew whose boat he was stepping onto. In line with classic Fred Neil legend, he was hiding to avoid a show he was supposed to be playing that night.

My father would sometimes look after David Crosby’s boat “The Mayan” while he was gone on tour and had sailed it back from the Keys along with my mother and I. The Mayan was built in 1947 out of an extremely rare Honduran mahogany that termites couldn’t easily eat and was featured on the picture sleeve of one of my favorite CSN seven inches for the song “Dark Star.”
 

 
The story he told me from the hospital bed began on one of his trips back from the Keys. I never really asked him if he was trafficking drugs back and forth… maybe I didn’t want to risk shutting the conversation down. He didn’t seem to have much interest in the stories himself and I had to pry a lot of it out of him. In this particular story he was about to sail back to Coconut Grove when he was introduced to a man on the dock who needed a ride into town. My father being generally pretty kind and fearless, told him that as long as he helped out with the sails and docking the boat he could come along.

Immediately he noticed how skilled and inquisitive the man was and acknowledged that he had a kind of hyper-intelligence. While they were talking about their backgrounds the man explained he was a musician named “Tim Buckley” and quickly pulled out his new LP to prove his identity. My father, probably not knowing who that was and being relatively unimpressed, went back to manning the boat but was ultimately charmed and invited him to come over and hang out with some friends after they got to shore. By the time they reached the dock the man had literally asked my father about every single motion he’d made on the boat and seemed to have memorized each task so that he’d be able to try and sail the boat himself next time.
 

 
The irony of the stranger’s identity would become more bizarre as they pulled up to the cottage my dad had been living in. Joni Mitchell had just gotten to town and was staying with Vince Martin, Fred Neil’s singing partner. She was looking for a slightly more stable place to stay where she could have her own room and my dad offered his place. So when my dad pulled up to his house with the stranger in tow, Vince Martin and Joni Mitchell were sitting on his porch. As my father approached them, the man introduced himself as “Tim Buckley” and Joni Mitchell said “That’s strange… I just played with Tim Buckley in New York.”  The way my dad told it was that the guy was so incredibly charming that he was able to laugh the situation off, eventually admit he wasn’t that Tim Buckley and charm her just the same. In fact, he ended up charming her so quickly that he moved into my dad’s place to stay with them where he and Mitchell fell in love.

The way my dad told it, their romance didn’t last all that long as she had to leave for a huge tour in a month or two as her career was exploding in the summer of 1968. They began to argue more and more as the tour pulled nearer and just like that, as soon as Joni left for tour, my father said the fake “Tim Buckley” was never seen again.
 

 
About a month later my dad was pushed into a car and then taken a dark room and left there for awhile to think by the Feds. I’m sure he probably figured it had something to do with his associations with local growers and traffickers, but he was initially relieved to find out they were only focused on the stranger he brought to town. As the questioning commenced an agent revealed that the man he’d brought into town was an international diamond thief that was wanted for several high profile heists. My father knew nothing about any of this so was probably very comfortable spewing obscenities and saying he didn’t give a fuck, knowing him. In the end they presented him with a statement that said he transported an international criminal into the US and he signed it just so he could leave.

A couple years later it occurred to me that I should probably order my father’s FBI files under the Freedom of Information act, but as my own music career got much busier I never got around to it. I even contacted Vince Martin to interview him for my favorite magazine Ugly Things, but never completed writing the piece. I got married and toured constantly in three bands so even my dad’s death was folded into an extremely confusing time that I still haven’t quite processed completely now. Searching through my emails the other night, I found Vince Martin’s response to me about this story from years ago and it hit me that he probably knows many more of these stories about my father.

Vince had written:

Wow! I never knew you and that’s a shame… and better late than never is cliche, but therefore very true:)—Did you know that your uncle Ron honored me with some of your father’s ashes which are on my living room table in a stained glass box.  I loved him… he was a great friend, we sailed and hung out a lot.  I miss him—-:)
I type with two fingers & its painfully slow—better to talk it:) ..Anytime Emil:)

Joni lived in my house on Bay Homes Dr.  I lived with her and Chuck, her then husband in detroit for almost a year… we were close.  I introduced her to David Crosby who ultimately produced her first LP…

and the story about the phony Tim Buckley is dead on. The guy sat in my living room and tried to tell me he was who he wasn’t when i knew Tim Buckley and knew this guy was a fake.  Joni and I stared at him… like maybe we were nuts.  Finally we knew it was his lie and we were still able to see.smile

Reading Vince’s email again brought things back into focus for me and I began searching on Google, typing in anything that might prove there was a show flyer leftover from Joni Mitchell playing with Tim Buckley in NYC like my father had said.

There was nothing out there at all… except one single link to a tiny bit of audio from a Joni Mitchell interview in 1988 that seemed to magically confirm everything immediately!.  My eyes widened as I poured another drink and listened to this fleeting evidence of the details my dad had reeled-off on the phone from his hospital bed.

One has to wonder if the man the FBI was looking for was actually Murph the Surf?

I looked back through more emails and found one from my uncle guessing that the man was either Murph the Surf or his accomplice. The years would’ve matched up pretty well actually considering Murph was imprisoned sometime around 1969, so this window of time may’ve been exactly when the FBI was pursuing him and his gang. How many international diamond thieves could the FBI have been pursuing in the Grove area at that time?

This is a guest post written by Emil Amos, who has recorded over 1000 songs. The new Holy Sons album is called The Fact Facer and it is out now on Thrill Jockey Records. The Holy Sons will be touring with Elisa Ambrogio from Magik Markers.
 

Posted by Richard Metzger
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10.06.2014
02:54 pm
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Donald Trump and the serial killers
09.29.2014
12:50 pm
Topics:
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Donald Trump does it again…

This morning Gawker reports that “gaping mouth with hairpiece” Donald Trump was pranked on Twitter by a “loser” (in Trump-sprach) who asked the “thick-fingered vulgarian” to retweet a memorial to his dead parents:

“My parents who passed away always said you were big inspiration. Can you pls RT for their memory?” asked Phil Bradbury, who goes by Feckhead on Twitter. Trump fell for the flattery and granted Feckhead’s request, but the photo he retweeted actually showed Fred and Rosemary West, convicted of torturing, raping and killing 10 girls during the mid-‘70s.

Fred hanged himself before he could be sentenced, and Rosemary is currently incarcerated for life.

Here’s, the greatest sentence ever written about Trump:

Trump, whose fuckup was retweeted thousands of times before he deleted it, continues to serve out his own sentence of life as Donald Trump.

Standing ovation.

Trump, having been trumped BUT GOOD is naturally threatening to sue!

Here are some responses from some of the people Donald Trump thinks are “losers”:

 

 

 

 

Posted by Richard Metzger
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09.29.2014
12:50 pm
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More, more, Moore: How much is a Henry Moore sculpture REALLY worth???
09.12.2014
12:19 pm
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So, how much is a Henry Moore sculpture really worth?

Well, if we were to judge this by the money some criminals have made from the theft of a few of Moore’s best known works, then we may be surprised to find that a giant bronze statue can be bought for as little as a few thousand dollars.

This was how much thieves made on one of Moore’s most revered sculptures “Reclining Figure” (1969-70) after it was stolen from the 72-acre Henry Moore Foundation estate in Much Hadham, England in 2005. Weighing over 3-tons and standing six feet in height and ten feet in length, this elegant bronze statue was valued at $5 million. The theft baffled police, who originally suspected the statue had been stolen to order, but on investigation discovered it had in fact been taken by “a group of travellers from Essex” who sold the giant bronze to a scrap metal dealer for $2,500. A bargain considering the value of the art work and the Henry Moore Foundation’s offer of $18,000 reward for the statue’s safe return.
 
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‘Reclining Figure’ (1969-70).
 
Over the past decade, Moore’s beautiful sculptures have been the unfortunate focus of thieves across England and Scotland who hope to make quick buck selling these giant art works for scrap metal. In 2012, two men were jailed after stealing Moore’s piece “Sundial” once again from the Much Hadham estate. The dastardly duo sold the sculpture for a mere $75. While “Standing Figure” (1950) was stolen from the Glenkiln Sculpture Park, Dumfries and Galloway, Scotland, and is also believed to have been melted down and sold for scrap.

So, it’s true—crime doesn’t (always) pay and thieves, it would seem, have no idea of the value of art.
 
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Moore by Allan Warren.
 
Henry Moore was one of the twentieth century’s greatest sculptors. Born in July 30th, 1898, the seventh of eight children, Moore was encouraged by his father and mother to be self-reliant and to value hard work:

She [his mother] had tremendous physical stamina. She used to work from morning till night until she was over seventy. To be a sculptor, you have to have that sort of energy and that sort of stamina. Sculpture is of all the fine arts the one which you have to have an absolute physical fitness. You can’t—in the early stages at least—be tired or ill if you want to be a sculptor.

 
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Moore later described his childhood as “a very good time” filled with “the warmth and friendship of a large family.” This was when he made his first tentative steps towards a career as a sculptor, playing games with friends at a local quarry where they made small wooden carvings and built clay ovens (“little square boxes with chimneys and a hole at the side, and we’d fill these with rotten wood and light it and blow on the fire to warm our hands in winter”) .

Moore was encouraged in his artistic ambitions by his father, on the condition that he had an alternative career to fall back on. In 1915, Moore became a teacher at his elementary school until he was called up to fight in the First World War, which he later described with characteristic understatement:

For me, the war passed in a romantic haze of hoping to be a hero. Sometimes in France there were three or four days of great danger when you thought there wasn’t a chance of getting through, and then all one felt was sadness at having taken so much trouble to no purpose; but on the whole I enjoyed the Army…After I was gassed at Cambrai I was in hospital for three months and it still affects my voice at times, but as they made me a PT instructor afterwards I suppose I must have got pretty fit again.

After the war, Moore attended the Leeds School of Art in 1919, where he considered himself “very lucky not to have gone to art school until I knew better than to believe what the teachers said.” At college he was influenced by such artists as Henri Gaudier-Brzeska, Picasso, Epstein, and Eric Gill, and in his sculpture he intended to get rid of the:

..complete domination of later, decadent Greek art as the only standard of excellence.

Moore won a Royal Exhibition Scholarship in sculpture to attend the Royal College of Art, London, in September 1921. Here he fell under the influence of RCA Principal, Sir William Rothenstein, who encouraged creativity, originality and the belief that his students should not be held back by England’s class structures as “a man was what he made himself.” Rothenstein also introduced his students to established artists, writers and politicians. This was how Moore found himself one evening talking to the Prime Minister Ramsay Macdonald:

Rothenstein gave the sense that there need be no barrier and no limit to what one can embark upon, and that is very important to a young student. Here was I, a student straight from Yorkshire, and it seemed perfectly natural for me to be standing in front of the fire and talking to the Prime Minister.

This new environment offered Moore the opportunity to try out different ideas in his work:

When I first came to London I was aware of Brancusi, Gaudier-Brzeska, Modigliani and the early Epstein, and of all that that direction in sculpture stood for. I couldn’t help—nobody can, after all—being a part of my own time. But then I began to find my own direction, and one thing that helped, I think, was the fact that Mexican sculpture had more excitement for me than negro sculpture. As most of the other sculptors had been moved by negro sculpture this gave me a feeling that I was striking out on my own.

 
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Animal Head.
 
Much more Moore after the jump, including The Art of Henry Moore documentary

READ ON
Posted by Paul Gallagher
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09.12.2014
12:19 pm
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